Advice for guitarists, including Guitar Wisdom Subscribers
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A Few Words About Jamming
These days, jamming gets a bad name, because many people equate it with noodling. Contrary to popular belief, jamming does not involve making things up on the spot. A real jam is a musical conversation.
A beginner will not necessarily improve by jamming with professional players, just as a college student will not necessarily become more intelligent by going out for a beer with a professor. Memorizing some licks and playing them with other musicians in order to impress them is not really the same as jamming.
How can jamming be used to improve your playing? Prepare yourself by listening and practicing. Learn to play some music that lends itself to jamming – maybe a few well-known blues tunes. Then, when you play with others, you will know what you want to contribute to the musical conversation and where you want that conversation to go.
If you are playing in a blues jam, the time for your solo will come around. Decide what you want to contribute to the musical conversation with your solo. In most instances, you will need no more than two choruses to say something. If the solo is really great throughout the second chorus, and you have something more to say, play through a third chorus.
Then, go back to your rhythm playing, and make it good, so that the other musicians can enjoy their own solos. If your rhythm playing is great, you will be invited back!
Developing Pitch-Recognition Ability
Many players rely too much on guitar tablature. They learn scales and chords as shapes or grips, and they become overly dependent on the “picture” presented by tablature. This is often the shortest route to learning some songs and licks, but by continuing to use this method for years, players sometimes short-change themselves! They do not develop their own musicality to its greatest potential, and this limits their style in many ways.
Eventually, these players begin to recognize that what they can confidently play is limited by what they can visualize – the shapes and grips they have memorized. That’s why, sooner or later, many of my students ask me the question, “How can I move away from the pentatonic shape?” Guitar playing has become a visual exercise for these players, and many of them want to turn it (or turn it back) into a musical experience.
In my lessons, I try to move players away from shapes and toward hearing the music – hearing how others have used intervals, degree, triads, harmony and so on – and learning to recognize what is going on in the music, so that it can be played with feeling. This is very much a matter of ear training, the most practical application of music theory.
So, if you are stuck in a pentatonic rut, it’s time to put away your tablature, and bring out your best musicality! And if you subscribe to Tomo Fujita Guitar Wisdom, you will discover a way to play more freely, without any need to visualize the shapes and grips that hold so many players back.
Guitar Practice Advice
Most students ask me, at one time or another, how they should practice, or what they should practice. Here is some guitar practice advice (most recent post is first) that may help you to figure out answers to these questions.
Physical Coordination
The human hand is a natural engineering marvel, but it is not designed for guitar playing. If you do not pay close attention when playing, the fingers of your fretting hand will go to the wrong places. That’s why it is important to develop good fingering habits. Various fingering exercises may be helpful. (Check out my “Accelerate” DVD/booklet, featured on the Publications page of this site, for suggestions.) If you include a few minutes of fingering exercises in your practice routine, all the difficult fingerings that you may encounter throughout your playing career will become relatively easy.
Many new players try to learn difficult fingerings from famous artists’ performance videos. As a result, these players develop a habit of using the “rock grip” (with the thumb of the fretting hand over the top of the fret board, to a greater or lesser extent) at all times.
The rock grip was made famous by players with large hands, like John Mayer and Jimi Hendrix. But the rock grip often limits the reach of a guitarist with hands of average size: the palm of the fretting hand is too close to the neck, limiting the range of movement that your fingers need for good rhythm playing. For this reason, I always encourage my students to add the “classical” grip, with the thumb of the fretting hand placed behind the guitar neck, to their technique.
The rock grip and the classical grip are useful in different circumstances. Neither grip is better than the other, across the board, for all styles of music. Each grip presents its own advantages and limitations. Don’t limit yourself by using a grip that works well for only one style of music!
Setting up Your Amp for Practice
I like to practice with a clean sound: no effects, and just a little reverb. A clean sound lets me hear everything that’s going on when I play.
If you play an electric guitar without an amp, you may develop a tendency to pick and strum too hard. Hitting the strings hard is fine for hard rock and heavy metal players, but if you would like to play in a variety of styles, you should work on varying your touch. The right touch will help you touch your listeners’ hearts!
I recommend that you always play with an amp, even if you have roommates, kids, a small apartment, or whatever. It is not necessary to play loudly. Set the volume as if the guitar were your voice – capable of a SCREAM or a whisper to suit the music you’re playing.
Here are my recommended practice settings for a Fender amp: Treble at 6 or 7, and Bass at 3 or 4. If your amp has a mid-range setting, it should be UP. Why more treble than bass? Treble is touch-sensitive. If you pick too hard, the sound will be too bright and brittle.
Hearing these overly bright and brittle sounds will help you to develop the proper touch with your picking hand. With these recommended settings (more brightness), your playing will have more dynamic range, which will add more flavor to your playing — especially your soloing!
Record Your Practice
I think there is some value in recording your own backing tracks and playing along with them. This approach forces you to practice rhythm and work on your time.
When you practice, record your performance. Keep the recording clean and simple. Do not add any effects, and do not concern yourself with levels or the positioning of the microphone.
Limit your recording time. It is unlikely that you will ever find the time to listen to ten or one hundred hours of your recorded practice sessions, but you will find time to re-visit a 10-minute clip and hear your progress.
Listen to some of your playing. Isolate the sound, so that you don’t hear a backing track or metronome. Does it sound good? Do you recognize the tune? Is it entertaining? If you are honest with yourself, you will know which elements of your technique need work.
If you use this approach, your playing skills and your attentive listening ability will improve. Soon you will be able to hear what is good in your technique, and what needs improvement, at the moment when you play. And you will no longer need to record practice sessions!
How Much Practice Time?
Many of my younger students believe that more hours of practice will lead to more improvement in their playing. This is not necessarily true. In my opinion, noodling away while you watch television will not make you a better player. Memorizing licks or playing up and down two-octave scales for an hour is not the best use of your practice time.
When interviewed for magazines or TV, famous artists sometimes say that, when they were younger, they used to practice fourteen hours a day. You should take what these artists say with a grain of salt. The quality of your practice is more important than the quantity. You need to find the practice methods that work for your learning style and your schedule.
Every Day?
If you are like most people, you have a busy schedule with long work hours, family and social commitments, and so on. Just fifteen minutes of practice each day will move you forward more effectively than practicing for several hours one day per week. (Think about it. If you were training for a marathon, would you run every day? Or would you skip your exercise six days a week and then run fifteen miles every Sunday? Which routine would prepare you for the big race? Which one might lead to an injury?)
Rather than practicing late at night, when you are tired, try spending a few minutes with your guitar in the morning. Practice before you get on with your day. Leave your guitar out of its case, so that you will be encouraged to pick it up every day.
Use a Notebook
It is important for any musician who is growing artistically to have goals and a sense of direction. I encourage all my students to set specific goals, but not too many at once. Decide on a specific direction, even if it is only tentative.
I recommend writing out goals and direction in a notebook (see Guitar Wisdom, Lesson 2). Modify or refine your goals and direction, from time to time, as you progress. After a practice session or a lesson, write a summary of what you have learned, and what you think about it, in the notebook. Limit this summary to one page, and write each note on one side of a sheet of paper. Later, you can re-visit what you have written, and you can add your latest thoughts on the opposite page.
Listen to Music
More preparation leads to more success in playing, especially when you play with other musicians. (I will have more advice on this topic here and in Guitar Wisdom.) Here is one obvious component of this preparation: you have to listen to music!
As a part of your practice routine, listen attentively to music, without any of the distractions of a phone, computer or other device. Listen with nothing in your hands — not even your guitar — for thirty minutes every day. This does not mean background music that is playing while you work on other stuff. Concentrate on the music, and internalize it, so that when you play, you can improvise by drawing from the reservoir inside you.
